License

The image4j library is licensed under the GNU LGPL so you are free to use it in your Free Software and Open Source projects, as well as commercial projects, under the terms of the LGPL.

History

This project began after I spent hours searching for a library that would meet the above criteria and found that there is probably no such thing - or at least, not any more. The only support I could find for the ICO format was read-only, so doing cool stuff - like generating favicons on the fly - using only Java code was not possible.

Planned Features

The following features are planned for development:

A WebStart demo

Support for RLE (Run Length Encoded) bitmaps

ImageIO provider for the various supported formats, where no provider currently exists (eg. ICO format)

Ant tasks for reading/writing/converting the various supported image formats

A javax.swing.Icon implementation for the ICO format that selects the best matching image for the current graphics environment

If you know of a feature you'd like to see in this library, drop me a mail <ianmdev at users.sourceforge.net> and we'll talk :)

QuickStart

It is possible to decode/encode BMP and ICO files with just one line of code!

The image4j library consists of only Java code and has no dependencies on third-party libraries, so you
just add it to the classpath and you're good to go.

Although the code is compatible with Java 1.5.0 or later, it should be relatively simple to port the code to an older version, eg. 1.4.2.
If you would like support for an earlier version of Java, please write to me at <ianmdev at sourceforge.net>.

Disclaimer

To my knowledge, there are no patents on either the BMP or ICO formats. If you believe that this library or this page violates any patents or copyrights, please write to me at <ianmdev at users.sourceforge.net>.